stains my vision, turns
my mind right
side down. Upside over,
my third eye finally feels
at home. From its unshadowed space,
it blinks backwards
at a world it is struggling to interpret.
I feed it store-bought knowledge,
diatribes from supposed scholars,
but in the end, the moment is all
that matters, and sometimes
a nose and a wing can interchange,
merge, break
boundaries, disregard the labels of motion
to release the photo-
negatives of a million, perfect
still
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp life
breaths.

A.J. Huffman has published six solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest. Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. www.kindofahurricanepress.com